- Hurricane Henri is making landfall as I write this
- The Haiti earthquake is a humanitarian disaster without the international help that they got in 2010
- Heat waves and resulting deaths
- Drought
- Wildfires in western states and the resulting national smoke plume
- Afghanistan
- The COVID-19 pandemic, with a fourth wave caused by the delta variant
- Climate change being highlighted by melting glaciers
- Flooding in the U.S. and around the world
Did I miss any big ones?
All of the above highlights the unstable world we live in. The role of emergency management has never had a higher profile and I think with climate change having more and more impacts the importance of effective emergency management programs will become even more critical.
Certainly the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) cannot keep up the pace they are on without additional people and resources. As staff bounce from one disaster to another, there is a body of work that never really gets completed — with disaster recovery sometimes taking many years or even decades to be completed.